Stochastic jetting and dripping in confined soft granular flows

Abstract

We report new dynamical modes in confined soft granular flows, such as stochastic jetting and dripping, with no counterpart in continuum viscous fluids. The new modes emerge as a result of the propagation of the chaotic behaviour of individual grains -- here, monodisperse emulsion droplets to the level of the entire system as the emulsion is focused into a narrow orifice by an external viscous flow. We observe avalanching dynamics and the formation of remarkably stable jets -- singlefile granular chains -- which occasionally break, resulting in a non-Gaussian distribution of cluster sizes. We find that the sequences of droplet rearrangements that lead to the formation of such chains resemble unfolding of cancer cell clusters in narrow capillaries, overall demonstrating that microfluidic emulsion systems could serve to model various aspects of soft granular flows, including also tissue dynamics at the meso-scale.

arXiv comment9 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Aspiration of biological viscoelastic drops
• Hysteresis and Avalanches in Two Dimensional Foam Rheology Simulations
• Mesoscale modeling of near-contact interactions for complex flowing interfaces
• Modeling pattern formation in soft flowing crystals
• Metastability at the Yield-Stress Transition in Soft Glasses

Cited by in corpus (3)

• DropTrack -- automatic droplet tracking using deep learning for microfluidic applications
• Lightweight Lattice Boltzmann
• Measuring arrangement and size distributions of flowing droplets in microchannels through deep learning